Robert Shogan, author and longtime political reporter for Los Angeles Times, dies at 83

Robert Shogan, a chief political reporter for the Los Angeles Times who also chronicled decades of American history in the shelf of books that he wrote in his spare time, died Oct. 30 at Sibley Memorial Hospital in the District. He was 83.

The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Cynthia Shogan.

Mr. Shogan was widely considered one of the most respected political reporters in Washington. After early stints with the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek magazine, he joined the Los Angeles Times in 1973 and became national political correspondent.

Until his retirement in 1999, and later in occasional commentary articles, he covered the political goings-on of the East Coast for readers on the West Coast and elsewhere who turned to his incisive reportage.

“I have felt there’s only one way for a reporter to look at or think of a politician, and that’s from a distance,” he once told C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb. “Any reporter who thinks that a politician is his friend is kind of foolish.”

Richard Cooper, a former deputy chief of the Times’s Washington bureau, said in an interview that Mr. Shogan seemed to know “almost everybody in Washington,” from presidents and secretaries of state to the more durable and often overlooked lower-level officials who often determine the course of national policy.

Unlike reporters who rely on academics or other outside observers, Cooper said, Mr. Shogan sourced his stories with “the people playing the game” — not those “sitting in the grandstands.”

Mr. Shogan also distinguished himself from other reporters, Cooper said, by his unwillingness to be “swept up in the idea of the moment.” His writing combined shoe-leather reporting with his long-view of history, a sensibility reflected in his numerous books.

One title reflecting his longevity was “The Riddle of Power: Presidential Leadership from Truman to Bush” (1991). His historical volumes also included “Hard Bargain: How FDR Twisted Churchill’s Arm, Evaded the Law, and Changed the Role of the American Presidency” (1995).

Writing in the Boston Globe, journalist Thomas Oliphant described the volume — an account of the two heads of state and their exchange of destroyers for military bases — as “a marvelous and compelling tale of intrigue, deception, vision, rank politics and grand strategy.”

In “War Without End: Cultural Conflict and the Struggle for America’s Political Future” (2002), Mr. Shogan analyzed the controversial social issues that, particularly in the latter years of his career, had come to polarize public discourse. Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley observed that the book revealed why Shogan had been so admired as a journalist.

“If Shogan himself has taken sides in the cultural war,” Yardley wrote, “I find it just about impossible to figure out what side it is, which is one of the highest compliments a reporter can be paid.”

Robert Merton Shogan was born Sept. 12, 1930, in New York City. He served in the Army for several years after receiving a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1951 from Syracuse University, where he was editor of the student newspaper.